Louis S. Warren

by Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody;the Wild West Show

  Key facts of Clair’s testimony were supported by Ed Clark, a ranch manager who testified that he had built another bedroom onto Cody’s small TE ranch home for Isbell’s use. The woman stayed there for several weeks in 1901, and William Cody eventually joined her there that year. They rode together frequently. He deeded her forty acres of his spread at the head of Rock Creek, and handed over some of his calves, ordering Clark and several other hands to mark them with her brand, the or “bar BQ.” 77

  Cody denounced Clair as a liar who was out for revenge after having been fired from the Wild West show for theft, and dismissed Ed Clark as a temporary ranch hand who was only briefly at the TE.78 He denied that he and Isbell were romantically involved. He did not take a room in Sherman, Texas, in the year in question, he said, because the show was only there for one day (which was true). In any case, on the road, even his private rooms functioned as semipublic business space, where he was surrounded by “from 1 to 10 people” until he went to bed.79 There had been no kisses between them that he recalled, although his staff was generally an affectionate crowd. As he explained it, Isbell was merely a hardworking, talented press agent. She secured positive reviews for the show in ladies’ magazines, a market that the Wild West show’s male press agents “did not or could not succeed in reaching.”80 Such coverage, with its appeal to middle-class women, helped maintain the show’s appeal as a family attraction. In this regard, Isbell was indispensable.

  Unfortunately, the press agent had fallen ill with tuberculosis. “I have sent quite a number of people out to Cody, Wyoming, who were suffering with tuberculosis.” The dry climate aided their recovery. He gave her letters of introduction to many people, including the town’s finest young women, who accompanied her to his ranch. He did not give her any property. She paid $200 for her forty-acre ranch, and $15 a head for the cattle. When she was at the TE, she stayed in the guest room, like everyone else who visited him.81

  Whatever the nature of Cody’s relationship with Isbell, the scandal of the lady press agent highlighted the contradiction between the domestic imagery of the show and the professionalism and independence of the women performers and publicists, from Annie Oakley to Bess Isbell, who were central to that image. Cody endorsed woman suffrage as early as 1894, and reiterated that support in later years. But for middle-class consumers the presence of unescorted, single women on the stage and in show life generally was one of the most questionable aspects of the theatrical world. William Cody testified that some of the most bitter disputes with Louisa followed farewell kisses bestowed upon him by young actresses at an end-of-the-season party in the mid-1870s. He felt the kisses were as innocent as hand-shakes. She felt otherwise. Thirty years later, the same issue reared up to separate Cody from his public, as the proximity of an unmarried lady press agent to his bed—whether in his hotel room or in his semipublic tent— became a titillating detail that undermined his assertions of manly self-restraint.

  None of his denials could overcome the allure of stories about the love triangle involving the “siren” press agent.82 In the context of all the other testimony about his drinking and his dalliances with prostitutes, there was enough to persuade the public, and the judge, that Buffalo Bill Cody was in love with a younger woman.

  Of all the accusations, Cody fought this one the hardest. “No, no more marriage for me,” he told a journalist. “If I get a divorce I’m going to live on the Cody ranch. I’m going to be buried there and have a red granite buffalo, heroic size, put over my grave on the mesa.” 83 He wished only for solitude and respite from the domestic war of his marriage, in the peaceful wilderness of the Big Horn Basin. As he explained in his testimony, he went to Wyoming because “I had never had any peace up to this time during my married life, and I wanted to seek a place where I could have peace in my old age; and I went off up into that new wild country to be away from trouble— domestic trouble.”84

  In the narrative combat of the trial, William Cody and his attorneys cast Louisa Cody as Lucretia Borgia and produced a story about a grasping, treacherous wife who attempted to poison her husband and deny him his rightful wealth.

  Louisa Cody and her attorneys cast her in a kind of inverted Wild West show, where she retreated to the settler’s cabin only to find her pioneer husband had been corrupted by the temptations of the frontier and now attacked her as enthusiastically as any savage. Buffalo Bill had become a renegade.

  It was up to the judge to decide which story was true. Then he could choose its ending. If he chose “Lucretia Borgia,” he had no choice but to grant William Cody a divorce. But if he chose the inverted Wild West, he could put a stop to the worst excesses of the prairie turncoat and tell him he was still bound to the settler’s cabin.

  That he chose the latter was, in a sense, not surprising. “Under the laws of this state incompatibility is not a ground for divorce,” wrote Judge Scott in his decision. Extreme cruelty and other indignities were cause for ending a marriage, but where William Cody alleged he had been poisoned, the judge averred that Louisa had only administered “some household remedy” to help him sober up before a banquet. In every way, William Cody was the one guilty of inflicting indignities. Louisa and her attorneys had made some charges about Cody’s infidelity which remained unproved. But when they withdrew those accusations, the judge found for Louisa. The Codys were still married.

  Louisa’s victory was the consequence of her story, which was more convincing than her husband’s. In this sense, his defeat reflected his failure to extend certain principles of show business into the trial. He had struggled for years to become a middle-class attraction. But in his divorce case, he presented a melodrama cast with a working-class crowd of seamstresses, ranch foremen, and housemaids. His case hinged on sensational tales told by the hired help. The limits of their credibility became apparent when one witness, the wife of ranch manager Henry Parker, testified that Louisa believed her husband had been the lover of Queen Victoria and later Queen Alexandra. The judge, horrified, ruled the testimony “so manifestly unjust, preposterous, false, and brutal” that he expunged it from the record.85

  Where there was evidence of her inhospitable behavior toward his guests, the court—and the public—sympathized with Louisa. His guests were theater people and besides, with one exception, they did not appear in court. The only testimony against her on this point came from Robert “Pony Bob” Haslam, a former Pony Express rider and booking agent for the show. He related that during a stay at the Cody house in North Platte, he was awoken by William Cody, who told him “things were not very pleasant” in the house, then took him to another of the Cody homes to sleep. The evidence, decided the judge, did not support the charge of mistreatment.86

  Louisa’s case, in contrast, was built on the testimony of North Platte’s “better class”: bankers, merchants, newspaper editors, and businessmen. There were some lowbrow moments, as when Henry Blake, a bitter retired soldier, related that the scout had a “bevy” of “dusky maidens” in his bed during the Indian wars. 87 But these were the exceptions, and even then the stories were consistent with tales told by North Platte’s most esteemed citizens. In the end, Louisa Cody appeared in a middle-class drama as the defender of her own home against the frontier hero gone bad.

  This story was nothing if not entertaining, and the press seized upon it even before the trial began. A reporter from the Chicago Inter-Ocean interviewed Louisa in North Platte right after her husband filed his petition for divorce. “Less than a week ago a prairie fire raged west of this place, and among the property threatened was the Cody ranch,” began the reporter. “North Platte people to the number of nearly 400 went out” to save the ranch Louisa Cody managed, and “for hours fought to save the buildings from the flames.”88 The article went on to warn that North Platte residents would sally to Louisa’s defense in her latest trouble, too.

  The prairie fire was an old symbol of savage frontier nature, one which Buffalo Bill had reenacted in The Drama of Civilization, in fact. Now h
e had become the prairie fire.

  In his decision the judge admonished William Cody and sent a message to Cody himself, advising him to contemplate the reasons for his own unhappiness. During the trial, Louisa’s witnesses hinted that Cody’s sisters often tried to intervene in the couple’s disputes, on their brother’s behalf. The judge urged the showman to weigh his own behavior over the years, counseling “that you and Mrs. Cody had been kept apart, not through the workings of your own brain and heart, but through the influence of your relatives.” 89

  Inwardly, back in Paris with the show, Cody raged. Judge Scott “has not had to live with her,” he fumed to an old friend. “Nor has he any idea of what a man suffers in his mind when he lives with a woman as cold blooded as a frog and who never sees anything good in any one… . He has never had to live with a woman like the one he has tied me to… . I would far rather die than to live with her… . If there is no way to divide the property then it will have to go. But no court can make me live with her.”90

  How much of each story was true? On some issues, the couple’s conflicts are easily understood. Their struggle over property had been going on for many years, and had been at the heart of the original petition for divorce in 1883. His income ebbed and flowed like an ocean tide. At high water, Louisa invested in real estate, which left him hurting during low times. In no small measure, the couple’s enduring wealth came from her investments.

  Disparate accounts of her language and temper are also easily explained. The consistent testimony by ranch hands and hired help regarding Louisa Cody’s bad manners suggests she could be coarse and abusive in private with employees. In public, and among people of her own class, she retained a more decorous persona. She resented the presence of “dirty show people,” as she called them, and preferred not to play hostess to them.91 The court found no reason to censure her for reflecting the general view of the middle class.

  The most bizarre charge might also be the most revealing. William Cody’s testimony about the banquet of 1893 suggests he was ill from something. Perhaps he was especially drunk. Perhaps he had food poisoning. But there is another possibility. Her attorneys suggested the so-called “Dragon’s Blood” was “love powders.” Louisa consulted astrologers, said one witness, and Mrs. John Boyer said she bought the potion from a gypsy camp.92 Weird as it sounds, the charge was not outside the realm of possibility: many of North Platte’s middle class flocked to a gypsy camp near the town at one point in the early 1890s.

  Louisa’s prejudices stand out in the trial. But if it was “love powders,” and if, as her lawyer implied, she gave her husband a magic potion to make him love her more, this is only another clue to her bitter loneliness. She was married to a profoundly absent man, by whom she had had four children, three of whom were now gone. Much of the divorce testimony concerned the raising of their youngest and sole surviving daughter, Irma. The young woman was now married and living in the Philippines with her army officer husband. But the testimony kept harking back to her treatment as a child, as if by reprising it, something now departed could be restored. William Cody complained that when she was a girl, he placed her in fine boarding schools, from which Louisa promptly removed her. This was the story with Arta, as well. “I furnished the means to send my children to the best schools in the country and paid for their tuitions at these different schools,” and with rare exceptions, “the children were never allowed to remain their full term at school.”93 He thought it obstinate and quarrelsome.

  But Louisa was lonely. According to one witness, “Mrs. Cody said that Cody could run around the country as he wanted to, but she wasn’t going to leave her baby in school, she was all she had and she was going to bring her home.”94

  During William Cody’s deposition in 1904, he faced many questions about marriage and children. “Was it while you were living in Rochester that you lost one or more of the children?” asked an attorney.

  “Yes, we lost our little son in Rochester,” he replied.

  “Do you remember his age at the time of his death?”

  William Cody seldom spoke of death, or of people who had died. In all his correspondence, there is barely a mention of any deceased friends or acquaintances. He wrote no poignant words about Wild Bill Hickok, Sitting Bull, or Nate Salsbury. No matter how tragic their deaths, he seldom spoke of the loss.

  But the death of his son, Kit Carson Cody, was different. The night Kit died, in 1876, William Cody wrote a letter to his sister, Julia. It was 3:00 a.m. “Julia, God has taken from us our only little boy,” he began. “Lulu is worn out and sick… . I was hundreds of miles away when Lulu telegraphed me and I only got home a few hours before Kitty died. He could not speak, but he put his little arms around my neck as much as to say, Papa has come.”95

  Years later, William Cody faced the question of Kit’s age at the time of his death. “He was five years and six months old when he died,” he answered. Then, almost pensively, he added, “He was five years, six months, and twenty-two days, if I remember rightly.”96

  The little boy was three decades gone, and if Cody’s memory reckoned his age wrong by about two months, the error only cast into sharper relief the sense of loss that sent the father backward through the years, trying to number all the child’s days. No doubt his mother did the same, for each of their children. There are a few pictures of Louisa and William Cody together, including family portraits with children. But to contemplate them as mother and father, producers of a family, is to weigh the empty spaces between them. Many families lost children in the nineteenth century. But each death eroded the bond between them, and to have lost so many left the Codys precious little to bridge their many differences.

  In another sense, William Cody’s show business strengths were his marital undoing. His mastery of ambivalence made him a fine icon for a mass audience. His spectacle invited fantasy. His show programs included excerpts from books in which authors made him a veteran of battles he did not fight. Why correct them? Why not reprint them, and let people believe if they wanted? As we have seen over and over again, spectators could project their fantasies upon him in part because he had been in some genuine Plains conflicts, in part because he looked like a frontier hero was supposed to look, and in part because he did so little to dissuade those who credited him with more greatness than he deserved. He lived extravagantly, and hid the costs and losses. He was a shimmering mirage of frontier success.

  He brought the same strategy to his marriage, where it proved much less successful. He wrote affectionate letters to Louisa, and simultaneously carried on his affair with Bess Isbell, allowing both women to see him in their future. He avoided open political battle and partisan strife. In private life, he abhorred confrontation too much to inform Louisa, or even to leave her. “I defy any man or woman to swear that they ever heard me speak an unkind word to her,” he told the court. “I do not believe in quarreling with either man or woman.”97

  His happy mask was a central issue in the trial. Her lawyers’ strategy hinged on a simple rhetorical question: How could a man who was mistreated at home seem so happy in the eyes of his friends and neighbors? Louisa and other North Platte residents puzzled over Buffalo Bill’s sudden abandonment of their town in 1901. He had seemed so affable and happy at the Christmas dinner that year. Then he boarded the train and never returned.

  In fact, in 1901 he had turned the ranch over to Louisa. That Christmas, he was again in need of cash. He returned home to ask Louisa for a mortgage or for a signature so he could sell some of their land in Wisconsin. She refused. He left angry.

  “When you left the home at North Platte the last time did you not leave on friendly and agreeable relations with Mrs. Cody and her friends?” asked Louisa’s attorney.

  “No,” he said, “she knew that I was displeased at being turned down at the ranch.” But he would not allow himself to show it: “I used the same tactics as I always have done through life to try and conceal any words or troubles by putting on a smiling face outwardly
while my heart might be aching inside. This I have to do in my business as a showman. No matter how bad the business is, we have learned that our capital and stock is a smiling countenance and a buoyant spirit.”98

  Now, his case lost, he headed back to Paris to catch up with the Wild West show. The public backlash against his divorce petition was harsh. The Masonic lodge in North Platte threatened to have a trial to expel him. Cody, a thirty-third-degree Mason who had been a member since 1869, was mortified. Fortunately, the lodge elected not to hold the trial. But Cody did not return to North Platte for years.99

  The press lampooned him, and criticism was widespread. In North Platte, the Reverend John Gray hailed the judge’s decision from the pulpit of the Episcopal church, where the Cody family had long ago donated two stained-glass windows in honor of their deceased children Kit and Orra:

  The careless, licentious and sensual attitude of too many persons in many of our communities has been held up to execration and shame. The pulpit sends back a resounding “Amen” to the judgment of the “righteous judge.” It pledges itself anew to teach the rising generation on these boundless plains cleanness of heart and hand the sanctity of the irrevocable holy and indissoluble relation of the marital covenant.100

  At least one eastern pastor wrote a note of thanks to Judge Scott. “If there were more men of your stamp to preside at divorce suits there would be less scandalous decisions.”101